Lately I am hearing MSPs say they aren’t getting the support they need from their vendors. Why does this not surprise me? I am not trying to call anyone out, but come on people, these MSPs are trying to run a business and support their clients. They need your support staff to be more attentive to their needs. I understand being short- handed, but some partners have told me they have had to wait over a week to get a call back. In this post, I am going to discuss the Good, the Bad and the you have got to be kidding me of vendor support.
Many people know Scott Barlow of Reflexion. Behind Scott is a team of skilled engineers, developers and support personnel. A couple of weeks ago I was moving my exchange server from one hosted firm to another. The new hosting company had an issue with something. I think that it might have been active directory with my account. Anyway, for almost 2 days I wasn’t getting any email to Outlook. But, because I had Reflexion’s RADAR solution for email archiving, I didn’t miss a beat or an email. Without RADAR, I surely would have missed out on important communications with my clients. The funny thing is just today a partner I coach told me, “Reflexion is the type of vendor that all other vendors should look to on how to do it.”
While I would never call any one vendor out by name, some vendors out there should take a look at how they support their clients. This not only goes for our industry, but any B2B business. We have all experienced terrible situations with vendors. The question is how can we, the customer, help these vendors improve their service standards? Sure, we could take the hard line and stop buying from them. That could hurt them, but it could hurt us more. After all, they already have our money! Another tactic we could take is to tell our peers about our bad experience. That will certainly get people talking and maybe the vendor will call to discuss the situation. No matter what happens or how heated the discussion might become I hope no partner of mine would say anything negative about a vendor, peer, co-worker or employee.
I want to stop beating up the vendors now and talk directly to you, the MSP. Frankly there is only one thing you can do and that is stop complaining and get to talking. Contact your representative at the vendor. If you can’t reach them, then contact their supervisor. Be calm but firm and tell them that you aren’t happy with their support. You are their customer! If they won’t listen to you, escalate it to someone above them. You absolutely must work your relationship with your vendors to make things happen.
Another way to get their attention and discuss your concerns is to attend their user conferences. These events take place all the time. The Autotask Community Live event is April 18 – 20, 2010 in Miami, Kaseya is planning their event at the Four Seasons in Las Vegas, Connec+Wise has their event in November, N-Able has an event as well, and last year it was in Scottsdale, AZ. You can easily get face time with the C-Level of your vendors at their user conferences. But even more importantly, you can talk to your peers who may be having the same issues as you. You will definitely find strength in numbers which is something the vendors will not be able to ignore.
My hope is that all vendors and MSPs get it together. We as an industry need to start communicating better and use the tools available to us to get the jobs done.
I wish you all a great week and hope to see you at Spring Training for Business March 10 – 13 in Mesa, AZ or at a conference this year.
All the best in success,
Stu